


Et in Arcadia Ego

by RobberBaroness



Category: The Prisoner (1967)
Genre: Gaslighting, Gen, Hallucinations, Witchcraft, folk horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25537354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/pseuds/RobberBaroness
Summary: "Black magic?" he asked.  "This is new."
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	Et in Arcadia Ego

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).



> I'm a big dummy who thought the deadline was the 27th...but this is your assignment! All my apologies, and I hope you like it!

Shortly after he had arrived, Six swore to never get used to this place. He could develop routines, he could become familiar with the geography, he could recognize many of the people, but this would never become normal. To let it do that was to be resigned to his fate, to give up everything he had fought for, and would be a slap in the face to everyone else who had ever tried to get off the wretched island. The place was a madhouse. It would always be a madhouse. He would never see it as anything other than a madhouse.

Even so, the Village could still surprise him. Such was his reaction when he saw a group of villagers gathered upon the green, relaxed and seemingly at peace with the world. Some sang, some braided each others’ hair, some twisted together wreaths made out of stray flowers. And in the middle sat a lovely woman in a plain white gown, loose golden hair flowing past her shoulders, decorated only by a scarf and a pin placed carelessly at an odd angle- a pin that bore the number Two.

“Six!” she cried, wearing a lovely smile. “I was so looking forward to meeting you! Come sit with us. I brought a flask of tea to share. It’s homemade and herbal- I do hope you like it.”

Rather than avoid the inevitable, Six sat down beside her and accepted a sip. If they wanted to poison or drug him, they could always do it by unobtrusively altering his own food or water (and indeed, they had done so repeatedly over his stay.) Her tea was tart but not unpleasant- probably brewed with berries and flowers, or some chemical approximation thereof. And it allowed him a chance to get a look at the new Two.

While some men of his generation held disdain for youth movements like the so-called ‘hippies’, Six did not- he found them overall harmless, and when they were not harmless, it was usually in the service of an understandable cause. The men and women behind the Village, however, could not have stood in greater opposition to the notion of youthful rebellion. Wearing the guise of such a movement was almost insulting in its disingenuity.

“So,” he said, “what is it to be now? I suppose all this is leading up to a new attempt to extract information about me. Why I resigned seems to be a common question among your lot.”

She smiled and shrugged with an irritating placidity.

“I’m the patient sort. I think you’ll come to tell us in your own time. I only wanted to make friends with such an interesting character. We’ll have so much time to get to know each other, after all.”

She looked about with a wistful smile on her face.

“This island really is a lovely place, isn’t it?”

“I suppose you would think so,” he said tersely.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to be insensitive! But I have always hated the city myself. For years I’ve longed to be closer to nature, to hear the waves lapping at the shore, to see the greenery growing freely, to walk among simple people unconcerned with the hustle and bustle of the mainland.”

“ _ Et in Arcadia ego _ ,” responded Six. “Death may still enter the green fields of paradise.”

Two looked almost hurt.

“Not to you!” she said. “Not to anyone real.”

It was a ridiculous thing to say, but as Six looked around him he almost understood what she meant. The placid prisoners on the green had an unreal quality to them, as if he was looking at neatly placed corn husk dolls. They showed no signs of resistance, no signs of autonomy, no signs of self-directed movement. He seemed to be looking at scarecrows rather than people.

It was an unpleasantly narcissistic line of thought, and Six did his best to shake it from his head. Nothing good could come from further conversation with a woman who encouraged such thought. 

He stood and began to stride away on his usual morning walk.

“Be seeing you!” she called after him.

“And you,” he muttered out of habit.

Behind him he heard Two’s soft, pleasant voice singing softly.

“ _ The queen of fairy, she caught me, in yon green hill to dwell… _ ”

***

No matter how far he walked or how much time Six had alone with his thoughts, however, he could not shake his new line of thought. The movement of his fellow prisoners looked jerky and unnatural, like marionettes on a string. How many of them really were false, plants by the forces behind the Village? Secret jailers really were little more than wooden decoys placed to lure out beasts of prey into the hunter’s sight.

Even when he’d seen them suffer, half the time it had turned out to be an act to bring out his pity and coerce him into offering himself to spare them. He thought of poppets and other such dolls, bound with the hair of a victim and stabbed with a pin to cause pain to another target. Perhaps in her own way, Two was telling the truth.

He spent an uneasy night with music running through his head and visions of wicker figures dotting the landscape. The water he drank before bed had the tang of his captor’s tea and the faint scent of blossoms clinging to it. He poured the glass out after taking only a sip, but the taste clung to him nevertheless.

***

The next morning, Six stepped out to see dolls made of sticks dangling from above the doors of his neighbors. Every doorway had one, save for his. Six grabbed one from over the doorway of Number Eight, but when he pulled it apart, he found no recording equipment- it was, at least to his eyes, nothing but a doll made of sticks and bound with twine. He tossed it to the ground and began to look for Two.

Somehow, he knew he would not find her in the command room. She had been on the grounds recently- he could tell by the sights and sounds of the villagers. They danced and sang, some frantically, some lazily, and he only narrowly avoided getting pulled into a dance himself. Normal placidity in a prison colony was bad enough without all-out false joy.

He found her at last at the edge of the forest, humming her song and drawing a circle in the ground with a white stick. No, not a white stick- a bone. An animal bone, of course, but still unnecessarily theatrical.

“Black magic?” he asked. “This is new.”

She looked up at him with a sunny smile.

“Do you believe in such things, Six?”

“I’ve read my Dennis Wheatley, and found it to be rather dull. But at least I can congratulate you on a novel approach to driving men mad.”

This time she did not seem to be insulted, only laughing and shaking her head.

“Driving men mad? You should know better. They’ve all been mad since long before I was sent on this assignment. If anything, I’m trying to bring a sense of purpose to this place. Oh, we want information, you may have no doubt about that, but we also must learn to live in tune with the island.”

She reached up with one delicate hand and touched Six on the cheek. He reflexively winced.

“Don’t you feel it?” she asked. “You’ve asked so many times which side runs the Village. The question itself is a trap. Some of my predecessors certainly believed they were working for one side or the other, but I know the truth, and I think deep in your heart you know it as well.”

She sighed, and even that sound was faintly musical.

“It is the island itself we appease. There is life here, and love, and a god who watches and takes our shapes when we try and catch a glimpse of its face. I am its high priestess, and you could be its king. Can’t you hear it singing to you, my sweet Tam Lin? Can’t you see it breathing?”

Six blinked and tried to look into her eyes. His head pounded as if it was following along to the beat of a drum, and the forest shimmered with light around him. He could see an expression on Two’s face that spoke of genuine fervor, or at least a clever imitation thereof. He looked down at the circle she had drawn, and could have sworn he saw it pulse.

“If they’ve hired a woman who thinks herself a witch,” he said at last, “Number One must be even madder than I ever realized.”

He was not feeling childishly petty enough to stamp out the circle she had made, but he knew he had to get away from her. Six usually had a perfectly honed sense of direction, but somehow the trees around him felt denser and more confusing than he’d ever found them before. He tried to steady himself, and managed to stumble back towards the Village green, but everything seemed somehow brighter and more garish than before.

Again a villager tried to pull him into a circle dance, and again he pulled away, but this time something was different. When he felt their hand, he did not feel flesh but something thin and dry- something like a bundle of sticks. He looked back and the hand seemed to be utterly normal, but he knew he had not imagined what he’d felt. It had been thin and sharp and he’d almost broken it with his grip.

The songs they sang clung to his mind, and he knew he had to reach his house or be driven mad.

In front of his door was another small animal bone. Six picked it up and broke it in half before entering his rooms.

Again the water tasted of flowers and berries.

***

His dream that night was even more vivid than the last. He was not, as a rule, prone to dreaming- when he did, it usually was of things tied to his past. But he saw things very clearly that night. He saw himself walk onto the green beneath a heavy canopy of nighttime stars, and he saw the other villagers gather there as well. And through the moonlight, he could see them as they were, perhaps as they always had been- nothing but witches’ poppets, bound in a maddening mockery of human life. He pushed one of them and it offered no resistance as it fell.

He woke with an unpleasant jolt, but the waking world somehow felt even more unreal than his dream world had. The walls of his house flickered around him- one moment they were there, the next they were replaced with wooden boards. The cup of tea he tried to pour himself was a swirling black brew, and when he poured it down the drain in disgust the herbal smell remained. He knew he was not alone in the house, but not because he was being watched by jailors. He could see the dancing lights around him, the fairies or spirits who truly made their home on the island, who perhaps always had been there, who had always been waiting for their high priestess to unveil them to him. How could anyone in the Village sleep with all those lights? How could he have ever slept when he was surrounded by such monstrous things as he was only now coming to see?

The door slid open when he approached, and he was somehow not surprised to see Two standing outside with a crowd of villagers standing around her.

“Come,” she said to him. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

***

Beneath the oppressive starlight, Two led the procession to the forest. She held Six’s hand, and this time he did not try to pull away from her touch. The smell of the greenery entranced him, and the rhythmic footsteps of the villagers behind him seemed to beat out the tempo of a song. They would find their place in the forest. They would all find their places in the forest.

Two led them to the same circle he had seen her draw before, but this time it was larger, and its pulsing was too obvious to be ignored. Shadows swirled in the center of the circle, obscuring the ground that should have been there. Two stepped aside and looked him in the eye. Again he saw nothing but honesty in them, and a sincere plea for him to understand her.

“You know the truth now,” she said. “It’s time for your prison to be broken apart. Cast away the dolls to the earth, and take your rightful place as king.”

A villager stepped forward towards the circle, and Two nodded at Six as if signalling him. And suddenly, understanding flooded through his mind.

She was a witch, or a spymistress. She had cast a spell upon him, or drugged him repeatedly. She wanted him to sacrifice her decoys, or else to trick him into killing his fellow prisoners. She wanted to crown him as her king, or else to move him to commit an atrocity and thus break his mind. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. If the Village was run by his government or his enemies or by the cult of a god who took the faces of those who glimpsed it, it was all the same.

Why had he resigned? He had told them once that it was a matter of conscience. He had all but said that he was being asked to do things he could not justify. He had told them, and they hadn’t believed him, because none of them could imagine a spy who kept his heart and soul. They would keep searching for ways to crack him open and pry information out of him, and they would never understand that they already had what they were looking for.

He could be broken someday, perhaps. He could certainly be driven mad. But if he hadn’t been willing to kill anymore for England, he certainly wasn’t going to do it for the Village.

He looked once again into the swirling void of the circle- perhaps it contained hungry spirits, or perhaps it was nothing but an elaborate illusion. He stepped towards the sacrifice he was to make, then seized Two by her long golden hair. Before she could scream, he pushed her into the circle, and the shadows swallowed her. There was an unearthly wail that shook the trees and pierced the night air, and Six fell to his knees in pain and disorientation as the very foundations of the Village shook.

And then his head stopped pounding and the trees stopped closing in on him. And when he opened his eyes and looked at the prisoners, they seemed to awake from something like a trance. Perhaps the magic had been real, and perhaps it had not. But when he looked at the drifting, confused villagers around him, he did not see dolls. Prisoner or jailor, they had always been people.

**Author's Note:**

> The folk horror film movement started a little after the end of The Prisoner. This episode could have happened...


End file.
